Contrary to the received image of the gnomic solipsist who composed and sweated out such starkly reticent plays as Act Without Words I & II and Breath, and such desiccated and removed works of fiction as The Unnameable and The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett was hardly the retiring type. He travelled freely and frequently all over Europe (he was fluent in French, Italian, German, and even learned Spanish along the way), had many close friends and associates, and wrote a ton of letters. More than 15,000 of them have been discovered in archives and private collections, and Cambridge University Press plans to issue a selection of them in four volumes, the first of which is now available. For Beckett-heads and students of the austere master this is an indispensable godsend, and will fill in many of the gaps in the Beckett biography. For the casual reader the letters provide a fascinating, funny, and at times very intimate look inside the heart and mind of a true giant of 20th century literature.

Despite coming in at nearly 800 pages and heavily larded with scholarly apparatus, Volume 1, which covers the letters from 1929-1940, is not as intimidating as it looks. The footnotes and editorial comments necessarily contextualize the letters, and superbly annotate their innumerable allusions and compressions. Every book that Beckett mentions, every author, every painting, every artist, every piece of music is identified, and in some instances corrected. Anyone he mentions is also identified. When he writes in a foreign language, we’re given both the original and an English translation. But even if the academic trappings and commentary bring you tears of ennui (and if you’re willing to forgo some understanding) the letters themselves are rather amazing documents. The Beckett we meet in them is by turns crude, witty, whiny, dismissive, brilliantly supercilious and scatological, but also warm-hearted, funny as hell, vulnerable and even earnest, tending to close most of his letters with endearments like, “Much love” or “Beautiful Greetings” or “God love thee,” or simply, “Love, Sam.”

Posted from many cities, including Paris, Dublin, London and Berlin, the letters reveal a restless and peripatetic Beckett wandering around Europe for teaching jobs, for pleasure and enlightenment, and simply for time and space to find his voice as an artist. Preparing Beckett’s letters for publication could not have been a simple task. He composed them in three languages — English, French and German — and they teem with neologisms, complex puns and the most esoteric allusions. A manuscript specialist stated that Beckett had the worst handwriting of any 20th-century author. Four years before his death, Beckett authorized publication of the letters provided that only those having bearing on his work be printed. As is the case with any true literary icon, the editors followed a general policy of inclusion, where nearly everything he wrote presumably sheds some light on his published work. Mercifully almost everything Beckett wrote is at the very least interesting.

Beckett´s literary output during the years covered by Volume I was minimal – a Proust monograph; an apprentice novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women; the stories More Pricks Than Kicks; the novel Murphy; poems; book reviews – but he read voraciously, and his self-education wasn’t limited to the written word. He studied music and art, and turned himself into a connoisseur of painting. The letters fully and for the most part unselfconsciously reflect the dazzling breadth of his erudition. But Beckett wasn’t above mixing high and low. He liked to go on about his health problems, both imagined and real, and the letters abound with mentions of heart palpitations, tooth decay, oozing cysts, bowel blockages and black moods. “The anus is better, it was really awful for fully 10 days in Berlin – consternating ... Otherwise I am as well as I ever am” (16 February 1937, to Thomas McGreevy). Some of Beckett’s more poignant, self-doubting and humanizing letters concern the difficulties he met getting Murphy published, and the general index lists almost a hundred references to Murphy and related matters.

Though Beckett is often identified with James Joyce (usually and perhaps erroneously as his “secretary”), only a few letters, and none of note, passed between them during this period. The two great writers were closest when they both lived in Paris (1928–1930, 1937–1940). Between these times their relations were strained and they did not write to each other. The cause of the strain was Beckett´s treatment of Joyce´s mentally ill daughter Lucia, who was obsessed with him. But there’s little to be garnered from the letters about how exactly Beckett’s relationship with his mentor and idol soured after he rejected Lucia. Suffice it to say that when Beckett returned to Paris in 1937 things were made good with Joyce, and he even helped proofread his Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). To McGreevy (in this curious passage) he notes that: “Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs. work on his proofs. That is needless to say only for your ear. He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.”

Other letters allude to key incidents in Beckett’s life: his psychotherapy treatments with Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, which led him to believe he had not been properly born; the stabbing by a stranger in a Paris street which landed him in hospital for two weeks (where the Joyces brought him custard puddings and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, his future partner and wife, unexpectedly visited him); a breakthrough in Beckett´s aesthetic perception during a German visit, when he entered into a dialogue with Cézanne’s paintings on their own terms ("I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but now that need is gone.”); and Beckett’s monumental switch from English to French as his primary language of expression, as explained in a letter (in German no less) to a man named Axel Kaun, describing language as a veil that the modern writer needs to shred if he wants to reach what lies beyond, even if what lies beyond is nothingness. Also intriguing are letters revealing roads not taken. In one he writes of wanting to be an airline pilot. In another he writes to Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, asking for admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. In other letters he discusses teaching in South Africa (even securing letters of reference), and Buffalo, New York of all places.

Beckett´s chief correspondent in Volume I, and the one with whom he is perhaps freest in his musings, is Thomas McGreevy, an Irish poet and critic he had known since 1928. Their itinerant lifestyles meant that they kept in touch primarily through the mail. Volume I includes over a hundred letters to McGreevy, and excerpts from another 50. As for any intimate missives by Beckett (i.e., letters to his mother, or to some of the women he saw romantically during that time), only a few are reproduced, none particularly engaging or telling. Perhaps this was in keeping with Beckett’s wish that only letters pertaining to his work be published. No doubt in time even the other letters will surface, in keeping with the idea that truly everything someone like Beckett wrote is worth reading. For now we must content ourselves with the letters as given and the encyclopedic scope of the research on the minutia of those letters. As for any poetry in them, it comes and goes and when it does it’s Beckett, as only Beckett can be:

“I write the odd poem when it is there, that is the only thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of accidia – willess in a grey tumult of idées obscures. There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations. It is good for children & insects. There is an end of making up one’s mind, like a pound of tea, an end of patting the butter of consciousness into opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgments. I lie for days on the floor, or in the woods, accompanied & unaccompanied, in a coenaesthesia of the mind, a fullness of mental self-aesthesia that is entirely useless. The monad without the conflict, lightless & darkless. I used to pretend to work, I do so no longer. I used to dig about in the mental sand for the lugworm of likes and dislikes, I do so no longer. The lugworms of understanding” (30 August 1937, to Manning Howe).

THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Volume 1, 1929-1940
Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck
Cambridge University Press
782 pages
$50.00

Salvatore Difalco is, among many things, senior writer for TORO and the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories.